The death of a felonious monk

News comes today of the death, in Blanco, Texas, of Samuel Greene, a.k.a. Father Benedict, the founder of a rogue Orthodox monastery that closed amid a sex abuse scandal. Greene, who was convicted of child molestation charges, may have committed suicide as he was on the verge of a parole hearing that could have resulted in his being sent to prison. His body was discovered on the overgrown grounds of his "monastery," a collection of trailers on a hill in central Texas.

Samuel Greene was a con man. He was a TV pitchman who got religion and founded the Christ of the Hills monastery in rural central Texas. At some point, he affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which cut him loose after the child abuse scandal happened in the late 1990s. But his trailer-park monastery was quite the spiritual hotspot for a while. When it became known in the early 1990s that there was a miraculous weeping icon of the Virgin Mary there, the monastery began to attract lots of pilgrims -- many of them Catholics. I was one of those pilgrims. When I'd go visit a Catholic friend in Austin, we'd drive out to the monastery, and I'd wait in line with the faithful -- most of them poor Hispanic Catholics, as I recall -- to venerate the miraculous icon. The monks would hand out cotton balls with her sweet-smelling tears on them. The substance was said to be myrrh. Years later, I found one of the cotton balls -- this was before the fraud was exposed -- and noticed that it smelled acrid and chemical-like. But I didn't want to accept that it was a fraud.

Why? Because every time I made a pilgrimage there, I would venerate the icon and ask the Virgin to pray for me either to find true love in marriage, or to be at peace with my single state. This was my constant rosary prayer for years, and I saw nothing wrong with making that prayer in an Orthodox monastery. I was new in the faith, and credulous. I sat through a Father Benedict lecture in the chapel at Christ of the Hills about Orthodoxy, but I was just being polite. I was there for the miracle ... and hoping for one of my own.

It so happened that in October of 1996, I asked my dear friend Frederica Mathewes-Green if I could meet her in Austin, where she was going to give a speech and a talk about her (then) new book, "Facing East," and accompany her on a trip out to see the weeping icon. She agreed. Frederica gave a talk on Orthodoxy at a Christian bookstore on a Friday night, and if memory serves, several of the monks from the monastery (which was small) appeared to chant prayers. A student from the University of Texas in Austin came to hear Frederica speak that night, as she admired Frederica's writing tremendously. I was introduced to that student, and knew instantly that there was something unusual about her. I invited her later that night to go with Frederica, me and others out to this monastery the next day to see this weeping icon. She was Protestant, and unnerved by it, but said yes.

The next day, with the student in line with me, I venerated the icon and prayed to the Virgin, saying, basically, "I don't know, but I think this might be the one I'm supposed to marry. If it is, please pray that God will protect us and bring us together. And if it's not, please don't let us be fooled."

Four months later, the student and I were back at the monastery, this time in the chapel, on our knees, thanking God for bringing us together, and the Virgin for her prayers to that end. Then I took a ring from my pocket and asked Julie to marry me. A young monk came in, and with tears in his eyes, blessed us both. Our marriage began at that wicked place, because of that disgusting pervert who mutilated a holy icon for the purpose of deceiving the faithful.

I mean that the icon, of course, was fraudulent. Earlier this year, a monk who had been part of the monastery cabal confessed in court that the weeping icon was fake -- and more:

In a recently released statement, Hugh Brian Fallon, one of five Blanco County monks accused of sexually abusing children, says the Christ of the Hills monks had sex with one another, used illegal drugs and faked a weeping Virgin Mary icon.

It later emerged that the wretched Greene secretly admitted to all of this:

In secretly recorded conversations, Greene reportedly admitted molestations dating to the 1970s, talked of smoking marijuana and deviant sexual contact since his plea, and confirmed authorities' suspicions that the monastery's weeping painting was fake.

Julie and I had been married for a couple of years when the first child abuse charges were leveled at the monastery. We thought about the little boy we'd seen running around in monks' robes there, and how that child must have been tormented (his parents had sent him to the monastery, to live with that nest of snakes). We must have been graced, because we knew that the taint of that place did not reflect on our marriage, that God brought a very great good out of that pit. And for that we were grateful. But how many poor souls lost their faith, or something else, because they believed in Sam Greene's con?

Anyway, it's only right to hope that Greene got right with God before his passing. Nobody is beyond divine mercy. I do hope that in His mercy, God will heal those who were broken by Sam Greene and his criminal coven, and that He will erase every sign that there ever was a monastery that profaned the name of Christ to defile His children.

It is amazing to me, and more than a little depressing, how so much of my life as an adult Christian is tied up with having trusted priests and bishops (for Sam Greene was once a bishop of some sort) who were sexual abusers, or aiders-and-abettors of sexual abuse, and then having learned that I was a fool to believe in these men. It's like I'm a magnet for trouble or something. I am determined not to get fooled again.